Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees Thursday that the company is freezing company-wide hiring and warned that further cuts are likely.
Zuckerberg had previously warned of an “intense period,” which could last up to two years with declines in company growth and revenue.
Fall in income conditions hiring in Meta
According to a report from Bloomberg, comments made during an internal call show how Meta is responding to a decline in its revenue that was conditioned by changes introduced by Apple in its advertising policy regarding ad tracking and by the slowdown of the global economy, which has been a transversal factor of destabilization for the industry. Against this background, Meta’s share price fell to more than half of the value with which they started this year.
Recapping background on this case, in May, Meta’s CEO reported a hiring freeze that would affect certain segments of Meta, noting that he could not make promises about possible layoffs. After a little time, already at the end of June, his speech took on another tenor. In a question and answer session reported by The Verge, he commented: “Realistically, there’s probably a lot of people in the company that shouldn’t be here… And part of my hope is to raise expectations and have more aggressive goals, and just turn up the heat a little bit, is I think some of you might say this place is not for you. And that self-selection is fine with me.”.
Meta spokesman Dave Arnold declined to comment further on the company’s move. However, he made reference to other Zuckerberg statements issued in the same instance: “Our plan is to steadily reduce headcount growth over the next year. A lot of teams are going to be downsized so we can shift power to other areas.”.
To face this scenario, Meta decided to implement radical plans to reorganize its teams, putting an end to an era of rapid growth with this first reduction in its workforce. Without going too far, since the founding of Facebook in 2004, the company had not faced a budget crisis of this magnitude, which has come to install in Zuckerberg’s speech that Meta will be a smaller company from next year.
